JAKARTA – The latest song taking Indonesia's internet by storm was not written by a recording artist, nor is it about a celebrity.
It is an AI-generated earworm about Energy Minister Bahlil Lahadalia, a politician associated more with fuel subsidies and cooking gas than viral hits.
Since mid-May, Mas Bahlil Ganteng – Indonesian for "Handsome Brother Bahlil" – has spread rapidly across TikTok, Instagram and WhatsApp groups, spawning dance videos, cartoon animations and countless remixes.
One of them, by Instagram user @fikriferdians, has been viewed more than 30 million times since it was uploaded on May 23.
Users have produced English- and Chinese-language versions, while others have recorded violin covers, ska remixes and a cappella renditions.
On May 31, even former president Joko Widodo joined the trend, posting an Instagram video showing visitors singing and dancing to the song outside his residence.
The clip drew on the now-familiar "Jokowi gate" social media phenomenon, in which supporters, politicians and content creators regularly gather outside his home to film videos and seek an audience with the former leader.
Like many things on the Indonesian internet – which recently turned President Prabowo Subianto's remark that villagers do not use US dollars into a flood of jokes and memes – it is funny, absurd, and surprisingly revealing.
The joke begins in the title itself: MBG is better known in Indonesia as the initials for Makan Bergizi Gratis ("free nutritious meals"), Prabowo's controversial flagship school meals programme.
The initiative has dominated headlines in recent weeks after a series of food poisoning incidents, culminating in the replacement of the programme's chief and the arrest of several officials in a corruption probe.
Internet users have cheekily repurposed MBG to mean Mas Bahlil Ganteng instead.
It is unclear exactly who first put the song together, but it did not emerge from a campaign rally or political advertisement. Instead, it appears to have been stitched together from online comments about the minister and set to an AI-generated melody.
One standout line affectionately refers to him as "my little bolu ketan", a soft sponge cake made from glutinous rice flour, inspiring a stream of AI-generated images depicting the minister as the dessert itself.
The lyrics form a crowdsourced portrait of one of Indonesia's most recognisable politicians.
Bahlil is not a singer or social media personality, he is both energy minister and chairman of Golkar, one of the country's largest political parties.
His portfolio touches everyday issues from fuel prices to subsidised cooking gas, making him a familiar and often controversial public figure.
But the phenomenon is about more than Bahlil. It offers a glimpse into a distinctive feature of Indonesian political discourse: the tendency to discuss serious political issues through humour, pop culture and coded internet language.
This is evident in how Indonesians increasingly borrow characters and symbols from popular culture to talk about politics.
Governments become "Konoha", a reference to the fictional village in the Naruto anime series, while powerful political figures are jokingly dubbed "Hokage", the leader of the village in the series.
The same impulse was visible in 2025 when One Piece pirate flags began appearing at protests and on vehicles across Indonesia.
What started as a reference to the popular Japanese manga and anime series about a band of pirates evolved into a symbol of dissatisfaction with the political establishment and a form of coded political expression.
In 2024, Prabowo's carefully cultivated "gemoy", or cute, persona became a meme in its own right, which many have attributed to his electoral success.
More recently, social media users seized on Prabowo's remark that villagers do not use US dollars into a flood of jokes and satirical videos.
Politics in the country is often filtered through memes, parody songs and fictional worlds, where humour becomes commentary. Jokes carry criticism, and internet trends can sometimes reveal more about public sentiment than formal political debate can.
The politicians themselves have learnt to play along. On May 29, Bahlil said in a video conversation with presidential special envoy and television personality Raffi Ahmad that he hoped to meet the song's creator over a meal.
He also joked that even his own children had started teasing him by calling him "Bapak MBG".
Golkar, meanwhile, has been quick to embrace the phenomenon, even as party leaders insist they had nothing to do with the song's creation.
For now, the song shows little sign of fading away. It continues to spawn remixes, dance videos and new variations online.
So ubiquitous has the tune become that it can now be heard everywhere – from Jakarta fitness classes to neighbourhood gatherings.
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This article was first published in The Straits Times. Permission required for reproduction.
